Free Roxana Sabieri

5 March 2009, 12:00am

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Those of us who report from Westminster, Washington or any other liberal democracy can sometime forget how lucky we are. We can write what we like and not fear that we will be arrested for it. Those journalists who report from authoritarian countries like Iran do not have this freedom.

Take the case of Roxana Sabieri. She’s an American journalist who has been arrested in Iran for, the Iranian Foreign Ministry says, “gathering news illegally”. The case of Sabieri, a Cambridge graduate, is a small but telling reminder of the nature of the Iranian state.